In the construction of concrete buildings, it is known to employ for the casting of various parts of a building such as ceilings, slab formwork that include various components. Slab formwork systems consist of prefabricated timber, steel or aluminum beams and formwork modules. Modules are often no larger than 6 to 9 feet or 2 to 3 meters in size. The beams and formwork are typically set by hand and pinned, clipped, or screwed together. The advantages of a modular system are that the system does not require a crane to place the formwork, speed of construction with unskilled labor, formwork modules can be removed after concrete sets leaving only bearers in place prior to achieving design strength.
United States Patent Application No. 2006/0042179 describes a slab formwork system with panel support beams underlying and supporting the panel support beams that have upwardly facing panel support surfaces extending along the panel support beams. The formwork panels have a pair of parallel, elongate intermediate members extending between and interconnecting parallel elongate side members and a sheet of material supported on the side and intermediate members. Connecting clips are retained in the downwardly open recesses that engage with support beams to secure the formwork panels to the support beams. As these fixtures require more labor intensive methods to deploy, a system of this nature takes a longer time to set up and is more difficult to assemble as it has a large number of components that are required to set up the system. This becomes a costly system as each part adds on to overall cost of the system.
Another method known in the art is disclosed in Canadian Patent 1055991 where a shoring or scaffold for construction uses stacked scaffold sections of a demountable type and having a height adjusting construction is provided. Each section has a pair of spaced apart end frames that are demountably cross-connected with respect to each other and the end frames of upper and lower sections have a telescopic adjustable relation to meet height requirements. However, this method does not provide ease of assembly as it requires some degree of mounting of the scaffolding before the construction can be done. This system and method is time-consuming due to the complexity of assembly and also requires the scaffold to be left in for longer periods while the concrete hardens. As a result, many scaffold units are needed to be in rotation for multiple cycles. This increases the turnover rate for said scaffold units.
This results in a longer cycle time as it requires the scaffold to be left in until the concrete completely hardens as the scaffold may not be removed before the concrete slab has reached the required strength. In existing scaffolds, the entire scaffold unit must be left in to provide support for the concrete slab for up to 3 weeks.
It is also known that the systems seen above require workers to manually adjust height of scaffolds by climbing up the elevated heights. This reduces overall productivity of the workers as it is a time consuming effort to climb on top of the scaffolds.
There is a need for a method or system for providing ease of assembly of formwork as well as a relatively lower cost to be used in construction of various parts of a building. There is also a need for a system that has a reduced cycle time where the scaffolds can be removed quickly without having to wait for the concrete to completely harden. This is in order to enable fewer scaffolds to be in rotation to reduce operational costs. There is also a need for a system that increases the productivity of workers who are using scaffolds in order to use the scaffolds efficiently.